Music professor Steve Swayne was recently awarded a Wilson Fellowship to write a book on his studies of the style and musical influences of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
Swayne explained the focus of the work he will do with the support of the Fellowship. "Sometimes I describe my book as a biography of musical style," he said, "so I'm trying to account for that life, the life of the music.
The working title of the book is, "How Sondheim Found His Sound." He hopes to show Sondheim's "indebtedness to classical music from 1880 " 1950," said Swayne.
Swayne, a professor of American and Russian music, has been studying the music of Sondheim -- who wrote the music and lyrics for "Into the Woods" (1987) and "Passion" (1994) among numerous other compositions -- since 1989 when he was doing graduate work at the University of Washington.
Sondheim's influence from classical music can be traced in many of his pieces. Swayne gave the example of a one-on-one relationship between "Wait" from the musical Sweeney Todd and a Xavier Montsalvatge piece translated from Spanish to "Cradle Song for a Little Black Boy."
"If one compared those two songs, one could clearly hear that Sondheim loved the Montsalvatge enough to creatively rewrite it. One can look more broadly at Sondheim's long established love affair with the music of Maurice Ravel and find moments like those in [Sondheim's] songs," he said, accounting for some of the composer's influences.
He has described the composer's pieces for musical theater as differing greatly from the work of others such as Rogers and Hammerstein, about whom he said, "You know what a love song sounds like, what a barn-raising song sounds like." About Sondheim he said, "The music behaves in a much more sophisticated way than the music that came onto Broadway since 1970."
Besides American musical theater, Swayne also studies Russian classical music, a subject on which he had been planning to write a dissertation before becoming interested in Sondheim. While conducting his research, he found a connection between the two, noting that Sondheim admired the music of Rachmaninoff.
Swayne is currently examining the similarities and differences between Russian and Western counterpoint. He has also studied Sondheim's use of counterpoint, noting a sonata written during the composer's studies at Williams. "He has a fugue in the middle of it, the most rigid of counterpuntal forms," Swayne said.
Grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation are annually awarded to students and teachers and are designed to re-center learning on the arts and sciences, according to the organization's website.